Worship is an integral part of the Christian faith. There are a large number of verses in the Bible that in some way tell us to worship/praise God. My favourite verse is actually one of these. “Praise the LORD, O my soul: And all that is within me, bless his holy name” Psalm 103:1 (KJV). For the longest time I had a very shallow vision of what worship was, I had always assumed that worship was when we sang praise and worship songs at youth, Sunday school, church, etc. It wasn’t until probably grade 10 or 11 that I realized that there was so much more to it than that.

Our Father wants us to worship Him because he provides, is watching over us, created us, and an endless amount of other reasons. Just like there is an endless amount of things to praise God for, there are almost as many ways to worship him. To name just a few prayer (1 Chronicles 29:10), Singing (James 5:13), and reading the Bible. I have always “struggled” with prayer, I struggle to say what I need to, but what I have come to realize these last 2 years is that the times I struggled to come up with the right words were the times that I was farthest away from Jesus. God knows exactly what is going on in our lives, and he has no need to hear our prayers, but he chooses to listen to our pleas and praise, because he wants to comfort us and wants us to know that he is always there.

God knows that we as humans will not always want to worship Him, because we don’t see the bigger picture and when trials and tribulations come our way we get angry, sad, depressed, etc. So what has He told us to do? He says Lament. Lament is defined in the dictionary as “to express sorrow, mourning, or regret”. God wants to here our sorrows, our pain, our anger, our frustration, etc. As I said above, He knows what is going on, He wants us to cry out to Him so that we can become closer to Him.

I want to encourage you to try a new form of worship or one that maybe you haven’t done in a while. For example if you haven’t served someone in a while try that, or if you don’t take time out of your day to read the Bible read a chapter a day for the next week. Jesus wants a relationship with us and relationships are not one sided, we can not expect Jesus to do everything for us if we are not willing to get into the thick of it and make a commitment to spend time with Him. Hopefully by serving you will learn something new about yourself, about Jesus and about your relationship with Him.